Chapter 438

You Ying's body became transparent in the light. Not the transparency of Void Escape—that transparency is 'void', the body actively shifting from solid to insubstantial, from existence to non-existence; during the shift the outline remains, only the texture changes from flesh to glazed glass. Her transparency is not that. Her transparency is 'transformation'.

Starting from the feet. First the toes, the big toe's nail plate became transparent first; the crescent white on the toenail was the last to disappear, like a small slice of moon swallowed by clouds—after the clouds pass the moon is still there, but it is gone. The feet are gone—not cut off, not devoured, but 'scattered'. Skin in the light loosens into countless light points, bones sublimate directly from solid to light threads, and blood, before scattering, condenses its last trace of warmth into a faint red mist.

The lower leg is gone—the old injury on the leg bone scattered as well, the scar from when she first fractured her fibula learning Void Escape, which healed leaving a white line; now that white line has turned into an extremely thin, extremely bright light thread, sturdier than the other light points, scattering slowest. The knee is gone—the bruise from today's kneeling scattered in the light into a small bluish-gray halo. The thigh is gone.

Her body turned to light bit by bit, light points peeling off her, each carrying a part of her—this one is the knee scar from the fall when she first learned Void Escape, that fall she hit hard, her knee striking the shattered rock of Returning Ruins; at the time she made no sound, just bit her lip and wiped away the blood.

That point is the sore lumbar bone from when she first stood up after being curled in the ancient mirror for thirty thousand years; because she had curled too long, her spine had forgotten how to bear weight, and when she stood the joints emitted a crisp crack. Another point, extremely small and bright, is the last trace of ancient mirror fragment clinging to her fingertip when she just moved her hand away from her chest; the fragment has merged beside her heart, but her fingertip still remembers its feel—cool, hard, faintly vibrating, like a sleeping bee.

These light points floated up from her body, each a memory fragment, drifting in the darkness and slowly spinning, like countless tiny tiny lamps, casting the ruins in intermittent light and dark.

The light merged into the core fragment of the Lord of Order. That fragment hung in midair—just the remnant left after the chaos split heaven—transparent as glass, as small as a grain of rice, its surface perfectly smooth with zero defects; light striking it does not scatter but passes straight through, so it is normally almost invisible.

Now it is visible, because it is absorbing those light points—each light point drifting near it causes its surface to ripple with an extremely fine wave, like a dewdrop striking water, the ripple spreading from the center outward; when it reaches the edge, that light point is sucked in. It breathes. Each inhale—the surface contracts, pressing the absorbed light points inward; then it expands, exhaling a thread of extremely pale silver-white waste gas. Then inhales again.

Like a dry seed buried in moist soil, after first absorbing enough water the seed coat begins to swell, to soften, to push open a crack from within. The fragment throbs—not pulsing in place but with a rhythm: thump, thump, thump. You Ying's heartbeat echoes from within the fragment. Her heartbeat has always been slow—when she was alone in the ancient mirror it dropped to only a few beats per minute; after emerging, speaking with people quickens it a little, and speaking with Wang Ping quickens it a bit more, yet it remains slow.

Like a heart—it embeds itself in the Void without support, hovering there, expanding and contracting, like a heart just taken from a chest still beating, unaware its master is dead, still faithfully pumping blood that no longer exists.

Like a lamp—its light is not constant, it brightens and dims with the heartbeat's rhythm; when bright, its light pierces the entire Holy Hall ruins, casting sharp shadows from the broken dome's remnants; when dim, only a pinpoint remains, hidden deep in the fragment, as if gathering strength for the next beat.

Like a newborn just opening its eyes—its surface was originally smooth and unmarked, now a hairline crack has split open from within, its growth silent and slow, like an eggshell being pecked from inside. Through the crack shines a chaotic hue—not silver-white, not transparent, but a chaotic gray, like the sky seen the first time one opens one's eyes before dawn. That is the infant's pupil. It has seen.

It is absorbing You Ying's existence, making her part of itself. Not malicious consumption—it has no malice, it is merely an unextinguished spark of Order. The spark knows no good or evil, only burning. To survive it needs fuel; You Ying's Void body, her law remnants, her sense of existence, are for it the most suitable fuel in heaven and earth—because she is a practitioner of Void law, Void itself is the antithesis of Order and the law most prone to resonate with the Order remnant core. It is not destroying her, but 'resonating'. The result of resonance is that her existence is drawn into the fragment's interior, merging into the underlying structure of the Order remnant core.

You Ying feels no pain. Because she no longer has a body. Is the body's disappearance instantaneous? No. From toes to waist it took less than a few breaths; in those breaths the body was like a book torn from the last page upward, page by page, to the waist, to the ribs, to the collarbone. No blood, no bone fragments, only light.

Only the part above her chest still retained a vague human outline—shoulder edges blurred, neck line still present, jaw clear, lips pursed. Without a body there are no pain nerves; without pain nerves there is no pain. Pain requires a carrier: skin to sense temperature, nerves to transmit signals, brain to interpret them and produce the conscious feeling of suffering. She had no carrier.

Her consciousness remained—consciousness is more fundamental than the body. The body is the vessel of consciousness; when the vessel breaks, consciousness remains. Her consciousness clung to the drifting specks of light—each speck a fragment of memory, each fragment proof of a life she had lived. They peeled from her dissipating body, hovering in the darkness, slowly rotating like countless tiny lamps, each casting an image of her own.

She was looking at herself. In the ancient mirror's thirty‑thousand‑year darkness, the dark was not pure black; there were glints from fragments, their edges sharp. She curled in the gap between fragments, afraid to reach out—reaching would cut her, the cut would not bleed, only exude infinitesimal void particles that drifted away before the wound slowly closed.

In that darkness she learned to wait, to be silent, to suppress her presence to the point where even the spirit of the ancient mirror forgot there was a shadow inside it. Then a hand reached in from outside the mirror—one day the mirror cracked, she peered through the fissure and saw a hand. The palm was broad, the fingertips calloused from sword practice, and an old scar marked the wrist.

That hand tentatively brushed the edge of a fragment, nicking it; blood seeped out and formed a round bead that hung in the void, not falling. She stared at the bead for a long time—it was the first living color she had seen in thirty thousand years. She touched the fingertip of that hand with a finger she had just barely managed to coalesce from the fragment's seam, cool meeting warm. It was the first temperature she had felt in thirty thousand years. The warmth traveled from fingertip to heart, taking a long while—her body had gone so long without temperature signals that its neural pathways had grown dull.

The first time she saw the sky of the spirit realm—walking out of the passage, the sky was blue, blindingly blue, and she unconsciously squinted. The muscles around her eyes, unused to squinting for so long, felt stiff. In that moment a speck of dust landed on her lashes; the wind blew it away, and she watched it drift off, thinking that even dust could fly in the outside world.

She learned to walk—not by void‑shifting, but with her feet. Step by step she trod the blue‑stone slabs of the Ninth Dao Institute, their shallow anti‑slip grooves making her soles feel solid and grounded. Wang Ping crouched to meet her eye‑to‑eye; when he lowered himself his kneecap cracked—a sound made only after long disuse of squatting. He asked her name; after a moment she replied 'Yuying.' He said it was fine, then rose. As he stood he braced his knee with a hand, an ordinary gesture she noted, for he was the first person who ever crouched before standing up in her presence.

She remembered Cangxuan—he stood beside her silent, hand on his sword hilt, the blade quiet in its scabbard, as still as she. One night she stood alone in the tree‑shadowed rear hill; he walked past without noticing—not because she hid, but because her presence was too faint. He stopped three paces away, tapped his sword hilt once—not a warning, but an acknowledgment—then continued on. He never spoke needlessly, yet he knew she was there.

Yuliuli played her a piece one night. It was a quiet night; Yuliuli sat on the stone steps, the guqin resting on her knees, her fingers lightly plucking the strings—not an ancient Luoxian melody but a newly composed one. The tune had no lyrics, only string notes, light and slow like water seeping through cracks in stone.

Midway through the piece she suddenly burst into silent tears, her face awash with water. She had thought she could not cry—she had not wept in thirty thousand years inside the mirror, assuming her tear ducts were dried up. Yuliuli did not stop to comfort her, merely kept playing. When the piece ended, Yuliuli untied a spare string from the instrument's tuning peg and gave it to her, saying it was a soul‑soothing string that would prevent nightmares if worn. That night she experienced her first dreamless sleep.

The memories spun in the light, round and round. Some whirled fast—so fast it was as if they were rushing to replay every scene of this life before vanishing, to be glimpsed one last time. Others turned slowly, reluctant to leave, dragging long tails of light through the darkness. Some suddenly dimmed silently, the memory fragments shattering into finer light‑dust, like burnt paper money scattered by a breath of wind. Others remained bright, shining as proof that she had existed, refusing to fade.

She saw Wang Ping. He stood a few paces away, pinned in place by the pressure of the order fragments. His face alternated between light and dark in the glow of the memory specks—when lit, light struck his left cheek, each white hair at his temples gleaming like frost, like the first thin snow of early winter on dry grass; when dark, his face sank into shadow, yet his eyes still reflected the specks, like two embers on the verge of going out, faintly breathing in the ashes.

She knew that face better than her own. In the ancient mirror she had no face—shadows lack faces, and she could only discern her vague outline from the fragments' reflections. Later she gained a body and a face, but she was unaccustomed to mirrors, always walking with her head down, avoiding water and any surface that could reflect her visage.

She was unfamiliar with her own face—did her forehead bear a scar? Was the corner of her mouth crooked? She could not recall. But Wang Ping's face she remembered clearly. His left eyebrow sat slightly higher than the right—he had once injured it, fractured a bit of the brow bone; when it healed, bone overgrowth pushed the brow ridge up a notch.

His eye bags were deep—not from age, but from spending countless nights on watch while others rested, the skin beneath his eyes roughened by night winds, pigment deposited in the dermis turning a faint blue‑gray. White hair flecked his temples—not a recent development; it had appeared when he left the Returned Ruins, having exhausted too much essence and blood there, and after returning his hair grew out white strand by strand, never darkening again. She resolved to retain his image—in her heart, in the place where she had no body, in the realm where she could still remember after becoming light. Memory was her last territory; she would not surrender it. Consciousness could dissipate, but memory could not. She would carry these scenes into the order fragments, so that the fragments would know—this person, you must not touch.

Wang Ping stood there, utterly still—not from lack of will, but because he could not move. The pressure from the core fragment of the Lord of Order was not aimed at him; the fragment had no conscious intent to release pressure, it was merely a seed feeding on fuel. Yet it was the residual core of order's law, and the law itself, on an ontological level, rejects non‑orderly existence.

It was an impersonal force field—like fire that need not 'intend' to burn you; thrust your hand in and it burns. Every non‑orderly presence in the vicinity was suppressed, the higher the cultivation, the stronger the suppression—because greater cultivation means a larger 'scale of existence,' increasing the ontological gap with the order remnant. Chaos‑aligned cultivators bear the brunt. Wang Ping is a Chaos True Lord; chaos and order are opposing positions at the level of law, so he endures the greatest suppression.

It weighed on him like a mountain—not on his shoulders, where bone and muscle could bear and shift the load, but on his very existence, every layer of which was compressed. His vertebrae from lumbar to cervical were bent segment by segment, the intervertebral discs compressed to the limit, and the water inside the nuclei pulped outward through the fibrous rings under pressure.

Like being immersed in a sea, the water's pressure squeezed his chest from all sides; each inhalation required him to stretch his thoracic muscles to the limit, while the external intercostals strained desperately to expand the rib cage a fraction. On exhalation the pressure crushed his lungs flat, forcing air out of the alveoli with a faint whistling sound. He heard himself panting.

Like the weight of an entire world pressing on him—not crushing bone, but crushing the very possibility of motion. He wanted to lift his leg—the leg was there, muscle, tendon, nerve intact. His brain issued the command, the motor cortex fired, the action potential traveled down the spinal cord, through the lumbosacral enlargement into the femoral nerve, reaching the quadriceps. The muscle received the order—fibers began to contract, tension building in the tendons—but he could not move. The link between his body and his will was shattered—not by severed nerves, but by pressure interfering at a deeper, ontological level of the causal chain: the generation of action from intention was suppressed.

His knee trembled—not from muscular fatigue, for a Divine‑Transformation cultivator's flesh hardly tires, and spiritual power can clear lactic acid in a few breaths. It was a tremor of 'cannot hold.' His knee braced against dual pressures to keep him from collapsing—outside, the order fragment's pressure pushed down uniformly, relentlessly, like a hydraulic press that never shuts off; inside, his will to stand pushed up—will is not force, produces no torque, but it can squeeze the last mobilizable spiritual power from his muscle fibers. The two forces tugged at his patella. The kneecap is a sesamoid bone floating between the quadriceps tendon below and the patellar tendon above, lacking its own ligaments, relying entirely on the surrounding tendons. At that moment those tendons were stretched to their limit—the quadriceps tendon pulling down, the patellar tendon pushing up, the sesamoid squeezed between them, grinding a fine creak on the bone surface. Soon the tendons would slip off the bone and the kneecap would fly free.

His eyes were tearing—not from crying. Crying is emotional—sorrow, grievance, longing—emotion rises first, then tears follow. His reason had not yet permitted grief, yet the tears came anyway. The tear glands are the body's slowest and most honest organs; they do not heed reason—while his mind assessed the situation, waited for a counter‑attack, and calculated Yuying's residual consciousness, his body paid no heed.

Under extreme pressure, the sympathetic nervous system goes into overdrive, spiking adrenaline and noradrenaline to over a hundred times normal levels; the body needs relief. The tear glands act as a pressure valve—when fear peaks, they shed fluid, expelling excess stress hormones, lowering blood pressure and heart rate a little. Tears well from the eye sockets, seep out through the tear ducts, stream down the lower lids to both sides, crossing the cheekbones—skin moistened by tears reflects the glint of the light specks. Some tears run into the corners of his mouth, salty. Moreover, there is body heat: when skin evaporates water it carries away warmth, but the tears have not yet evaporated, they remain warm, the sole sensation at that moment telling him he is still alive.

He told himself inwardly—don't cry, now is not the time. She has not fully dissipated; a fragment of her consciousness still clings to the light specks drifting toward the fragments. If you cry, she will see it; seeing it, she will not rest easy. If she does not rest easy, she will not depart peacefully, and her scattered consciousness will linger in the fragments as an obsession. He must not let her become an obsession.

But his body would not obey. It grieved for him—his mind had not yet accepted the fact, yet his body had already done so. His prefrontal cortex was still running the logical projection: Yuying's existential magnitude was falling from the Divine‑Transformation stage, her consciousness integrity declining at fifteen percent per breath, and after a few more breaths it would fully fragment beyond re‑assembly. He had not yet processed that conclusion. His body needed no digestion—it sensed her presence ebbing from the void like tide receding on a beach, the water beneath his feet draining seaward, sand sucked from under his soles. He could only stand, pinned in place, watching her points of light drift from between his fingers, one by one, toward the fragments.

He reached out. His hand was the only thing that could move—in the direction where the pressure was weakest, pointing toward her. The pressure inexplicably opened an extremely narrow channel—perhaps the fragments permitted him to bid farewell to the sacrifice, or deep within the order remnant's instinct lay something ancient and primal, a memory from when chaos first split and all things were undivided; at that instant it recognized his Chaos Dao and identified him as 'an entity allowed to approach.'

Perhaps it was merely that the direction happened to have a gap; the pressure field was not perfectly uniform, and as the order remnant absorbed Yuying, its own field shifted minutely in phase, leaking a slit. His hand squeezed through the gap, his fingers plunging among the drifting light specks—his forefinger touched a speck that was projecting a memory. On his fingertip the speck exploded into a small scene: she in the ancient mirror, the darkness thick, she peering out from a crack between fragments, seeing a hand reach in—broad palm, sword‑calloused fingertips. That was his hand. She used the finger she had just barely managed to coalesce from the fragment's seam to touch his fingertip—cool meeting warm. The image shattered on his fingertip, breaking into finer light‑dust that trickled down from his knuckles.

The light specks streamed between his fingers. Instinctively he clenched his fist, trying to grasp them, but could not—like water, which slips through no matter how tightly you press your fingers, leaking from the creases of joint skin, between nails, from the hollows of palm lines. Like wind—when it passes between fingers there is a fleeting chill on the palm, the sensation remains while the wind has already swept past the back of his hand, leaving only a tiny stray hair on the back of his finger, bent by the breeze.

Like time—time is also something you can't grasp; it flows between your fingers without you feeling it, and by the time you feel it, it has already flowed away for a long while. He clenched his fist, the palm empty. Light spots flickered a few times on the back of his hand— they weren't trying to leave him, their direction had already been set. With their final flicker they settled on the back of his hand, drifting grain by grain from his knuckles, then converging toward the fragment direction. That was her final farewell to him—not an embrace, not a wave, but a 'touch.' Using the form of light spots, she touched his clenched fist once more, as she had rarely touched him before; even when she occasionally did, it was just a fingertip tapping the back of his hand.

The gloomy shade was no longer there. Those light spots were not her—she herself was already gone, even the last human silhouette having just dissipated. Those light spots were her transformed light, her memory fragments, the remnants of her existence, her relics. She had become light, become fragments of memory, become fuel being absorbed by the shards. This was her choice—she chose to sacrifice herself, using her void-law embodiment as a seal, sealing the last spark of activity in the order shards. She sealed it within the shards so it would slowly extinguish, until it could no longer burn, until the Lord of Order could never return.

She did not turn to look at Wang Ping, because she no longer had eyes to turn. She also did not call out to him, because she had no mouth. But at the final moment—when her consciousness still lingered, still attached to the last speck of light—she made a decision. She did not let that speck touch anything else, nor did she let it convey some complex message; she merely adjusted its direction. She let the final speck drift past the direction where Wang Ping stood. It was not drifting toward him—it brushed past the left side of his forehead, a finger's width from his face, then continued drifting toward the center of the shards.